Elayne said:

I think “Privilege is not needing to consider how non-privileged groups feel about the way you paint them” absolutely sums up the whole… blackface kerfuffles of 2006 extremely well!

That one kind of literally, huh?

Godless Heathen:

At the time I wasn’t nearly as enlightened as I am now, and my fat butt was made the topic of conversation more often than not.

That’s awful!

I also heard that a similar thing happened to one woman at our school. She was the only heavy woman in the class and apparently because of that the teachers made her the subject of all the dieting and fat-related example sentences. When one student pointed it out, the teacher was like, “Oh, you’re right! Maybe I shouldn’t do that.” The next day? There was another example sentence about fatness and she was still the subject.

In college we read Spanish novels packed full of racism and homophobia which the professors rarely addressed in class. It’s extremely hard to speak out in a class where your grasp of anti-oppression practice has to clash with your mastery of a language you aren’t fluent with, then defend your position against all the privilleged folks who take it upon themselves to bicker with you.

Yeah, I hear you on that. I think a significant portion of my Japanese practice comes from teaching myself how to argue with my teachers. With Japanese it’s even more strange because of all the politeness. Usually I’ll speak in the polite form, throwing in some super-polite phrases. But sometimes when they’ve angered me I’ll just (still in polite form, but not using the phrase softeners) go straight for the punch. Even though they deal with students who do this a lot, I think it still shocks them. Especially when it comes from someone who doesn’t usually speak that way.

I do wish I had the language to better combat these things, though. I haven’t even been able to memorize “discrimination” and so I have to constantly look it up… But I do try to engage in easy to understand concepts. For instance, in the example I used in my post about the excusing “Lose some weight!” as a good thing, I turned it into a discussion on eating disorders. It probably won’t make the teacher stop making those sentences, but maybe it will help the class to understand why weight remarks are harmful, not helpful.